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Top-20 Law Schools: Which Produces the Best Return on Investment?

If you’re thinking of applying to law school, you probably already know that it can be very expensive. For the top-10 law schools, the average price of tuition is over $40,000 per year. For a 3-year degree, that means you are spending upwards of $120,000 on tuition alone – not including living expenses. This is a serious investment of time and money!

The good news is that for many law school graduates, careers in law offer incredible compensation, tremendous career stability, and often access to some of the most newsworthy business transactions or lawsuits. For graduates from the top-20 law schools, median starting salaries for recent graduates can be as high as $160,000 per year – more than justifying the high cost of tuition.

So, with that said, how do we determine which of the top-20 law schools provides the best return on investment? From an economics perspective, this can be broken down into three primary questions:

1. How much does the school tuition cost?
2. How much does a graduate from that school make on average?
3. What percentage of those graduates are actually employed after graduation?

Thus, we should be able to follow a relatively simple formula: (average starting salary) X (percentage of graduates who are employed after graduation)/(tuition costs). The result of this calculation should give us the answer!

Now let me be clear: this is an economic analysis. Of course, value when picking a law school can be defined in countless ways: in a school’s strongest departments, location, faculty, student body, etc. For this blog, we’re thinking about your wallet, and considering which of the top-20 law schools will give you the most bang for your buck. Let’s begin!

Our Factors

Below is a table with the average post-graduation starting salary, total tuition costs, and percentage of graduates employed after graduation for the top-20 law schools.

A couple of quick things to note about this table: First, you’ll notice that Yale Law School, although it is ranked number 1, has the lowest median salary. Largely, this is due to the fact that Yale Law School graduates receive a disproportionate number of positions as judicial clerks – an extremely prestigious role in which a recent law graduate works for a judge. Despite its high prestige, the position carries with it a relatively modest salary. However, for Yale Law students who forego the clerkships, median salary for recent graduates is also $160,000.

Second, you’ll notice that many schools have median salaries of exactly $160,000. This is because compensation for entry-level hires at large law firms is fairly standardized, and individuals’ compensation at different large firms is frequently identical. Thus, for most of the schools at which the median sits at $160,000, it may be a fair assumption to say that more than 50% of graduates receive offers at one of these large law firms.

Third, Washington University in St. Louis does not report a median salary post-graduation. Although unscientific, I will assume that were their median salary to be on the higher-end, they would report it, and the conspicuous lack of reporting is indicative of a lower-than-normal or at best, an average median salary post-graduation.

The Best Investment

So – with that said, which of the top-20 law schools provides the “best investment”? The table below shows our outputs.

Coming in at the Number 1 spot is Berkeley Law School (Overall Law School Ranking: 12). In second place is University of Chicago Law School (Overall Law School Ranking: 4). In third, we have Stanford Law School (Overall Law School Ranking: 2).

Most likely, what these rankings are telling us is that at these particular law schools, in addition to having slightly more affordable tuition as compared to their peer schools, graduates are employed at the higher-paying law firm jobs in greater numbers. Schools such as Harvard and Yale, most likely due to the higher proportion of their graduates who pursue clerkships after graduation, are therefore lower in our rankings.

So – what are the takeaways from this analysis?

Within the top-20 law schools, which law school you attend may not matter all that much if your ultimate goal is for career stability and strong compensation. If your goal is to enter into academia, a political or diplomatic career, or other non-law firm courses of employment, you would need to look at a different analysis. But of course, the money is not all that matters here! The road to law school comes with an intense work load and requires diligence – make sure you will be fulfilled with the school and legal path you choose.